


Deathgrip

by disco_vendetta (brinn)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-11
Updated: 2012-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-14 00:27:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/disco_vendetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night after the training exercise debacle lasts for years. (Post-"Failsafe")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deathgrip

The night after the training exercise debacle lasts for years.  
  
She wakes not gasping and restless, like M'gann, but slow and groggy and weighted-down, wrenching her heavy eyes each time she blinks. The only thing she can compare it to is that time when she was six and got pneumonia, and Jade, with good intentions, had given her almost twice the recommended dose of cold syrup, not understanding the child sizings yet. She had lain in bed that night, her throat raw with coughing, and just as she had begun to drift to sleep she had the sudden flash of gut instinct: _if I go to sleep, I am going to die._ That's how it had felt, anyway, to her muddled and sick-sore brain, and she had fought tooth and nail to stay awake the whole night through, shivering and scared. That's how this feels, too, half-rolling off that table, like she's clawing her way out of molasses and that if she ever, ever stops it will be the end of everything.  
  
No one goes to help her. No one goes to help anyone. Instead, they all curl in on themselves, hugging their own arms and not looking at each other. The room swims in her vision.  
  
Martain Manhunter wants them kept under observation, to run some more tests to make sure their brains aren't permanently addled, but Red Tornado appears, seemingly out of the _wall_ or something, to say something pointed about them having done _quite enough_ for one night. And it's strange because the _back the fuck off my kids_ tone is so clear even his in automated voice that for a second she just wants her mom so bad it takes her breath away.  
  
Eventually M'gann's unceasing sobs just turn into so much white noise.  
  
  
  
+  
  
  
  
She gets the story in bits and pieces, and even then she knows she's missing all the important parts. M'gann unknowingly lost control of the exercise. They all "died," but she was first. It involved the end of the world and the whole thing was very traumatic.  
  
So they stumble along from room to room all over the mountain, the walking wounded with unfocused eyes. Robin's hands don't stop shaking.  
  
  
  
+  
  
  
  
They're afraid of falling asleep.  
  
They don't say this out loud, but it's obvious from the way they keep doing these little nonsense things to keep themselves busy - Robin unpacks and repacks his utility belt, cleaning imaginary rust off the edges of his Batarangs; Kaldur just keeps taking things off of shelves at random, turning them over in his hands, and putting them back. Conner watches static on the tv, his arms locked around Wolf's thick neck.  
  
Wally, on the other hand, has been inexplicably trailing after her from room to room, not saying anything, just… _hovering_ and pretending he isn't, like a sad puppy or a toddler, like she's the only person he knows at the party. She eventually ducks into her room just to get him to go away because something about the way he won't look at her makes her feel intensely uncomfortable.  
  
M'gann is waiting for her, sitting primly on the edge of the bed, eyes huge and dry. She's just…empty. She doesn't have anything left inside her that hasn't already been scraped raw and raked over coals and now she's just…there. Too tired even to float, her hair even seeming to lie flatter than usual. She is defeated.  
  
"I'm so sorry, Artemis." The delivery is strangely flat, hollowed-out. She just stands there for a long minute, her shadow reaching long fingers out to where the other girl is sitting on the carefully made-up bed. She can't remember the last time she slept here. Months ago. She should really change the sheets.  
  
Finally, she sits down to the side of her, landing heavily on the mattress. She can't even remember what grace feels like. (She should get some posters for this room or something, maybe some books or - )  
  
"You nearly died," the Martian says suddenly, voice flat and drained utterly of any emotion. "Because I lost control. I believed you were dead so completely that I made you believe it, too, I made you _all_ believe it - I just. Your coma - it's all my fault, Artemis, and I'm _sorry_ , I'm so sorry, I'd do anything to make this right, I - "  
  
" _M'gann_ ," she finally gets out, talking over her voice. "Meg. Stop. Stop it. This was not your fau - _listen to me_." Her raised voice sounds like shouting in the empty room.  
  
"Listen to me," she repeats. "This was not your fault." And because of lots of reasons but mostly because she just wants someone to _touch her_ , she wraps her arms around M'gann's shoulders from behind, hugging her as tight as she dares and says again, right against her ear, because she needs her to _know_ , "This was _not_ your fault." M'gann says nothing, just bows her head down so her bangs fall over her eyes.  
  
"God, you're being so _stupid_ ," she mumbles into her hair, just resting her chin on that pale green shoulder for a long while, so tired she can't see straight. Eventually, she just sort of lets herself fall over, lying half on top of one of her arms, facedown on the pillow.  
  
After a few minutes, she feels the dip in the mattress as M'gann lies down next to her. She turns her head a little so she can see, then rolls over until they're matching, facing each other on their sides. Even M'gann's eyelashes are the strange burgundy color of her hair.  
  
It's harder to tell with the Martian skin, but there's a bruise on M'gann's neck, just above the hollow of her clavicle, a dull forest green against the bright candy apple color of her throat. Artemis _knows_ she should be _paying attention_ , should be saying something that will make M'gann alright again but for whatever reason she's fixated on it until it takes up her whole vision. And anyway, M'gann is never going to be alright again. Not really.  Not completely.  
  
She ghosts her fingertips over the circumference of the bruise, and M'gann shivers just a bit at her touch, amber eyes drifting closed for a moment.  
  
"Is that from…?" She trails off, not knowing how to ask, if asking will just making it worse. "It's just…my back. Where I got shot. It hurts. And I thought maybe you…"  
  
Her voice peters of again. She doesn't want to think about that. About dying. About _M'gann_ dying.  
  
"No," the other girl says softly, "Uncle J'onn, he…here." And she presses her fingers into the dip between her breasts, curving her shoulders around the phantom wound protectively. For her own sake Artemis imagines she can hear her heartbeat from all the way over there, and it helps calm her down a little.  
  
She's so caught up in counting out that imaginary pulse ( _thump-thump, thump-thump_ ) that when M'gann's fingers travel absently back to her neck, she almost starts with the simple realization of it. It's so _mundane_ , so completely unimportant, but she knows that it would have been so much bigger to both of them a few hours ago, when things like hickeys still mattered and they hadn't felt their own hearts stop beating in the sticky cocoons of their minds.  
  
She imagines Superboy giving that to her, all sweat-sticky skin and open-mouth breathing. Even if she were willing set aside the whole Committed To Be Stupid In Love With M'gann issue, as much as she likes looking, she's just not sure she could ever be brave enough to actually try making out with him - getting a shattered pelvis during sex only sounds appealing when it's not _actually_ a literal danger. Conner, who still accidentally yanks doors out of their frames and crushes stuck jars into shards as often as he opens them, must have to be so gentle with her, so _careful_.  
  
And for whatever reason the _thought_ of that, of how she knows even without having been there how neither of them would ever have outlived the other by long, how neither of them would have _wanted_ to, it just makes her cry. It's the ugly kind, that's hardly any noise except the staggered, half-wailing gasp, and M'gann clutches her so close and so tight that the sound is all but muffled against the edge of her collar bone. She can feel her face getting red and too hot, snot running down her nose, her eyes and throat swelling up so every shuddering breath _hurts_ and she just wants it to _matter_. She wants someone to _care_ that she died the same way M'gann cared that Conner died, she wants to know that her death would bring someone, _anyone_ to their knees with physical pain.  
  
M'gann pulls back from her, gently, and wipes off the tears and mucous and smeared makeup from her face, not even flinching at the stickiness on her fingers, and then, very deliberately presses her forehead flush against Artemis's.  
  
M'gann's thoughts drift into hers, gently, little vine-like tendrils of ideas and memory that twine themselves all around her own, nudging at the edges of her mind until the memory of her own face fills her world, lit up golden from behind by a searing ray of yellow light, distracted and unnoticing and determined (and _beautiful_ , her face in M'gann's mind is all tawny skin and full lips and eyes like dark water). And this one thought crystallizes out of all of it, a snowflake framed on her skin just before it melts:  
  
 _I love you so much I almost killed you._  
  
They stay like that for a very long time, heads touching and M'gann's hands cupping her face, wide awake with their eyes closed.  
  
It's enough.  
  
  
  
+  
  
  
  
The ghost of M'gann's thoughts follow her around for the rest of the night. It's like she's catching echoes of what the other girl is thinking - she feels the disjointed hum of Wolf's thoughts float through her mind for a second, which is why is takes her a moment to answer when Robin finds her in the training room.  
  
"…What?" she finally manages.  
  
"I wasn't sad when you died." There is nothing malicious about this statement. He sounds confused, if anything, puzzled. Resigned, maybe. "I didn't feel…anything. It was like it wasn't even real."  
  
"It _wasn't_ real," she points out, sweeping the inner gears of her bow with an oiled cloth.  
  
"But it was to us. When you died Miss M _made_ it real. But it was still just…nothing. There was nothing there." She tightens a screw with her free hand.  
  
"You thought the world was ending," she shrugs. "Priorities."  
  
"The world should have ended when you died." He says this so flatly she can't tell if she'd supposed to take it seriously or not. "It _did_ end for M'gann. The world ended five times for her. Wally wouldn't stop screaming when you died. People are supposed to care when people like you die."  
  
She doesn't even know how to touch that. No one's mentioned that last bit before. She loosens her grip on her bow where it's digging red grooves into her palms.  ( _When people like you die._ And what sort of person is that?)  
  
"Kaldur apparently didn't go to pieces, either. You had a mission. You thought you were saving the earth. You didn't have time to feel anything."  
  
"Kaldur kept it together because he had to, because Kaldur's the leader. I kept it together because I just…did. It wasn't even a problem."  
  
Artemis counts the spare arrows in her quiver, picking at the fletching on each one. His voice is almost vacant.  
  
"It's just…sometimes I don't think I feel things the way I'm supposed to."  
  
"I don't think there's a way you're _supposed_ to feel things, Robin. I mean," she breaks off, awkward and unsure. She is the last person in the world who should be giving advice on emotional availability. "Do you… _want_ to? Feel things more?"  
  
"...I want to be the sort of person who _wants_ to feel things more. I just - I got _annoyed_. With M'gann. Because she didn't want Conner to die. That's the strongest thing I felt the whole time. I just wanted to smack her so she would stop _crying_."  
  
She lifts her hand up from her quiver, hovering for a moment by his shoulder, but then she just draws it back again. This has never been her place.  
  
He ignores it, just takes the arrows from her hand and begins checking their balance, his hand brushing hers for the barest of moments.  
  
"You matter, Artemis." This statement is directed towards empty space, his eyes squinted at an arrow, behind his glasses. "You matter to this team and you matter me. It should have been important. It should have been the end of the world."  
  
She leaves him there. There isn't anything else to do.  
  
  
  
+  
  
  
  
"I did not let them grieve you."  
  
She's in a hallway by the kitchen when Kaldur finds her or she finds him or their orbits intersect, but suddenly he's in front of her, a million feet tall and beautiful in this really absurd, alien way (well, not _alien_ , but -), his pale eyes gleaming against his dark skin.  Even as haggard as he so obviously is, he looks like a statue, a monument to some dead Egyptian king. M'gann's mind started trickling into her own again a few minutes ago and she's struck dumb with the force of it ( _Conner has always been so strange about letting her touch him, she's the Martian, she's the one who's supposed to be embarrassed by all this needless fleshiness, by the the undignified brush of skin on skin, she's embarrassed by how badly she wants to touch him all the time_ ). Her hand is frozen halfway towards a light switch, though she has no idea now why she wanted to turn it off.  
  
"But I was selfish, because I still let myself. There are many ways of mourning in Atlantis." And he holds out his hands, fingers stretched wide so she can see the delicate webbing between them, then turns them palms up. On the skin of his left palm a neat, shallow pattern has been cut - a deliberate, rounded sort of symbol. She can see the faint scars of where he's drawn it before, ghosting around the puckered red edges.  
  
"You did this…during the exercise?" He nods solemnly. "But then…you did it again? After?" Another nod. She doesn't know how she's supposed to respond to this, if there are words she's supposed to say, customs to be honored. She can feel M'gann's mind pulling away again and she shivers with the loss.  
  
But then he puts his hand on her shoulders and leans down to press a kiss - chaste and so soft - first on her lips, and then in the very center of her forehead.  
  
" _Sareme_ ," he says, against her skin. "Sister. Whose blood is my blood."  
  
She has absolutely no idea what to do, what to say, what to do with her hands. So she just _stares_ at him, at the strange silvery green of his eyes and bows her head.  
  
( _Thank you for trying to save them,_ she wants to say. _Thank you for making them go first._ And, quieter, _Thank you for throwing him through, he's so_ dumb _, thank you for being the best of us._ )  
  
"I did not let them grieve you," he repeats. "But that does not mean that we did not mourn."  
  
  
  
+  
  
  
  
"I can't _believe_ you would be so stupid!" he shouts. "I can't _believe_ you managed to get yourself _killed_ in the first five minutes of the mission!"  
  
"An _alien warship_ with sentient canons _shot me in the back_ ," she snarls back, confused and hurt all over, wondering how a few moments ago she could really have thought she might manage to avoid him the entire night. "I didn't _get_ myself killed!"  
  
"We needed you!" He shoves himself in front of her, and his voice is raw that it sounds like he's been screaming at her for much longer than he actually has. "We _needed_ you there, you're our _archer_ , we were trying to _save the fucking world_ and you just _let_ yourself - "  
  
"Why didn't you just ask imaginary Speedy to help you save the imaginary world, then, if it was _so fucking important_?" He's an inch away from her face now, flushed red and angry under his freckles and she is _not_ going to cry, she's _done_ crying for one goddamn night. Suddenly his hand reaches out and she has the shocked-numb idea that he's going to _slap_ her, for getting _shot_ , that _asshole_ , when he grabs her arm instead and yanks her hard against his chest.  
  
The deathgrip he has on her has got to be the most uncomfortable hug she's ever had, his arms wrapped, viselike, around her neck and shoulders, trapping her face against the waffle-knit cotton of his shirt, her temple against the jump of his pulse. Her hands are hovering on either side of his torso, and she has the vague idea that she should be shoving him away (he doesn't even _like_ her, she thinks desperately, she doesn't even _like_ him), but somehow her arms just wrap tight around him, pressing their stomaches flat against each other, like this is the only thing keeping her from falling back down into that horrible, unending blackness of before.  
  
Wally's face is in her hair (loose across her back, and tangled, she can't remember when she ripped it out of its ponytail), his breath hot against her skin, the blunt edge of his teeth bumping her scalp for a second as he breathes wetly.  
  
"I guess it's Red Arrow now, anyway," she says helplessly into his chest, and he _laughs_ , this strangled, half-sob of a noise, and it's the best and the worst sound she's ever heard.  
  
She can feel M'gann slither into Conner's lap, the width and solidity of his body against her, getting all confused with Wally's wiry leanness, and she feels M'gann shudder at hard-soft press of Conner's mouth, the sweet-salty taste of his tongue, and a shiver runs the whole length of her spine and Wally just holds her tighter and this is officially the weirdest moment of her whole entire life.  
  
Wally is mumbling something about photons into her hair, how he had been sure about something, but she can feel Conner's mind opening in M'gann's so it's like the _three_ of them are thinking _I love you I love you I love you I love you don't you ever leave me don't you_ dare _leave me_ over and over again, to each other. Then the two of them recede from her mind, tidal, as quickly as they came in, and it's just her now, her fingers fisted in the soft flannel of Wally's shirt.  
  
"You are not replaceable," he half growls, half shouts, loud enough to startle her, to set her teeth on edge. And again, softer, "You are _not_ replaceable. You're, like - " and here he breaks off again into one of those awful, snuffling almost-laughs. "You're, like, _necessary._ "  
  
And because she's tired and all fucked up and she _died_ , they _died_ tonight, she kisses him. Just grabs him by the hair and smashes her mouth down against his, clumsy and inelegant and fumbling, their teeth clicking against each other for a second when they both tilt their heads the same way ( _typical_ ), finding that better angle. She finds his bottom lip (the sweep of her tongue a phantom twin of M'gann's), her hands in his hair, his arms still tight around her neck, awkward and all-wrong and somehow holding the world in place, the whole universe spinning on this one, lone axis.  
  
She pulls away (she won't look at him, she wants this fixed in her mind just like as it is, all she can see are his hands, clenching and unclenching fists) and walks away, back to her room, to sleep, to _rest_. She's so tired, and she feels _stretched_ , like she's gone from achingly empty to uncomfortably overfull in a second, and she just wants to _sleep_ now, to sleep for real and not wake up sweat-soaked and afraid.  
  
If she falls asleep and she really does die, this will have been enough.


End file.
